After protests across Iran turned deadly in January, President Donald Trump promised Iranians that “help is on the way.” On February 28th, the U.S. and Israel launched what immediately became a devastating war on Iran. American and Israeli warplanes began dropping...
How the Past Whispers to the Present in Iran
This first appeared on TomDispatch. In the first chapter of his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain offered a telling observation about the connection between past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the… present often seems to be constructed out of the...
ICE Brings the War Home
Originally appeared at TomDispatch Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers pulled over several cars in Eagle County, Colorado. They took the people away in handcuffs, according to a witness, and left the cars idling at the side of the road. When...
Eight Decades Later, It Remains One World or None
Consider me an A-bomb baby. I was just a year old when, in the war my father had been part of, my country dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, devastating those two cities and killing more than 200,000 people, including an estimated 38,000 children. Like so...
Trump’s $1.5 Trillion ‘Dream’ Military’
Reprinted from TomDispatch: What constitutes national security and how is it best achieved? Does massive military spending really make a country more secure, and what perils to democracy and liberty are posed by vast military establishments? Questions like those are...
Trump’s Doubling Down on Imperialism in Latin America Is a Formula for Decline
Originally appeared at TomDispatch. Give Donald Trump credit. He’s added new meaning to that ancient phrase “gunboat diplomacy.” In fact, by the time I wrote this introduction, his administration had already attacked 35 boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern...
Edging Closer to Armageddon?
Originally appeared at TomDispatch. These days, no kids in school are ducking and covering under their desks. American magazines don’t have stories about families (with the money) building private nuclear shelters to guard against an attack on this country. And I can...
A Thermonuclear Hair Trigger
From TomDispatch: Once in the previous century, I actually visited the city of Hiroshima. I was an editor at Pantheon Books and had published a translation of a Japanese volume, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. In it, years later, a few...
An Unexpected Con To End Free Speech
Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothed ICE agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties...
A New Gold(en) Mine for Arms Contractors
Reprinted from TomDispatch: Donald Trump remains a mystery man of some eerie sort. After all, just ask yourself, why in the world did he only recently announce that this country was going to “immediately” resume nuclear testing, not having tested a nuclear weapon —...


